1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a logical object search framework and application programming interface (API), and more particularly to using a logical object search framework and API to execute and administer queries in a data management system.
2. Discussion of Related Art
In today's information-driven economy, the ability of an enterprise to efficiently store, update, and use information can be critical to the enterprise's ability to serve its customers and compete in the economy. An entity such as a business enterprise can model a concept of an entity relating to that enterprise and use such modeling information to maintain and use information relating to that entity. Some examples of entities that can be modeled by an enterprise include customer, product, bill of materials etc. An enterprise can maintain and model data relating to these entities in either a relational programming environment or in an object-oriented environment such as the commonly used Java environment. In a relational system, data is maintained in one or more data tables, where each row refers to an instance of the entity. In an object system, an entity concept is modeled using classes, where each instance of the class, called an object, refers to an instance of the entity, with characteristics of those objects being known as “attributes” of that object. In order to bridge the two systems, object-relational modeling (ORM) techniques are used to enable an enterprise to use data maintained in relational databases in an object-oriented environment.